1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a multimedia object organization and playback system. In particular, the present invention relates to a multimedia object organization and playback system that groups objects heuristically and allows playback based on similarities between the grouped objects.
2. Related Art
Enormous growth in digital technology has given rise to vast collections of information, including music and multimedia objects, such as files and data streams; phone, personal, or restaurant contacts; news articles; photographs; and many other types of data files. For example, fast processors, Internet music stores, and almost boundless and inexpensive data storage have given the everyday individual the ability to build an extensive digital collection of music. At the same time, advanced music players have taken on the challenge of providing convenient access to the hundreds or thousands of songs that may be in such a collection.
Music objects may be organized based on pre-defined or user-defined designations, such as an artist, album, or genre of the music. For example, MP3 or other music object types may include ID3 tags associated with the music object. The organized music objects may be stored in playlists based on the designations, and may be transferred to music players and played back based on the playlist or designation.
The user interface on a music playback device typically displays a list of tagged objects that are stored or available on the device. However, the user interface typically presents only simplified views of the objects, such as displaying the entire list of objects, or lists of objects restricted by a limiting selection. For example, the objects may be displayed in alphabetical order, or they may be displayed according to a genre or artist selection. Once the objects are tagged or catalogued, the listener may decide what objects to listen to using the user interface.
Listeners may be interested in playing a small number of groups of music, where each group is similar by some musical or psychological attribute. Conventional user interface applications for data object lists do not allow groupings of objects other than by pre-defined designations and categories. Other limited playback features may also be present. As one example, the user interface may permit a listener to select random shuffle playback. Another option often provided is to permit playback from a manually defined and entered playlist of songs. In other words, conventional user interfaces provided insufficient playback flexibility in many situations. The explosive growth of digital music collections exacerbates this problem.
Therefore a need exists for a system that allows grouping of objects based on heuristic characteristics and allows playback of music objects based on such a grouping to improve the music selection and playback experience.